A Mississippi man charged with sending ricin-laced letters to the president and other officials was described Thursday as a good father, a quiet neighbor and an entertainer who impersonated Elvis at parties. But accounts also show a man who spiraled into emotional turmoil trying to get attention for his claims of uncovering a conspiracy to sell body parts on the black market.

Paul Kevin Curtis, 45, detailed in numerous Web posts over the past several years the event that he said “changed my life forever”: the chance discovery of body parts and organs wrapped in plastic in a small refrigerator at a hospital where he worked as a janitor more than a decade ago.

He tried to talk to officials and get the word out online, but he thought he was being railroaded by the government. Authorities say the efforts culminated in letters sent to President Obama, a U.S. senator and a judge in Mississippi. “Maybe I have your attention now even if that means someone must die,” the letters read, according to an FBI affidavit.

“He is bipolar, and the only thing I can say is he wasn’t on his medicine,” said his former wife, Laura Curtis.

Jim Waide, an attorney for the Curtis family, said Paul Kevin Curtis was prescribed medication three years ago. “When he is on his medication, he is terrific, he’s nice, he’s functional,” Waide said. “When he’s off his medication, that’s when there’s a problem.”

Curtis made a brief court appearance Thursday, wearing shackles and a Johnny Cash T-shirt. Attorney Christi McCoy said he “maintains 100 percent” that he is innocent. He did not enter pleas to the two federal charges against him. He is due back in court Friday.

In several letters to U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and other officials, Curtis said he was writing a novel about black-market body parts called “Missing Pieces.”

The documents indicate Curtis had been distrustful of the government for years. In 2007, Laura Curtis called police in Booneville, Miss., to report that her husband was extremely delusional, anti-government and felt the government was spying on him with drones.

But Laura Curtis said Thursday that she doesn’t believe the current accusations about her ex-husband, who was arrested Wednesday. “He just likes to speak out,” she said.

“What they say he did is so unlike him, it’s unreal,” she added. “Until I hear him say he did it, I would not, I would not, I could not believe it.”

During their 10-year marriage, the couple lived in Booneville in north Mississippi. Her ex-husband moved to Birmingham after the split but eventually went back to Mississippi, most recently to Corinth, about 100 miles east of Memphis. Laura Curtis said he would visit their four children — ages, 8, 16, 18 and 20 — almost every day. He recently bought his youngest child a bicycle, she said.

Others say Curtis’ behavior was often erratic.

Curtis and his brother worked as Elvis impersonators, and David Daniels, an attorney in Tupelo, said Curtis was in a show he helped organize about 10 years ago. He said that while he had no problems with Curtis’ brother, he had an altercation with the suspect.

Daniels said was sitting in his vehicle one night after rehearsal when Curtis walked up. “He started beating on the windows and screaming and hollering,” Daniels said. “I thought he was kidding, but he was serious.”

Daniels said Curtis was holding a beer bottle and threatening him with it. Daniels said he pointed the pistol he kept in his car at Curtis. “I told him, ‘If you try to hit me with that bottle, Kevin, I’m going to shoot you,’” Daniels said.

He said Curtis stayed by the vehicle for as long as 15 minutes. “He was screaming and ranting and raving about body parts being sold,” Daniels said.

Daniels eventually filed assault charges, and he said the judge who handled the case was Sadie Holland, one of the three people who received a letter suspected of containing ricin, according to authorities. Records show she sentenced Curtis to six months in the jail.

Daniels was an assistant district attorney at the time of the encounter with Curtis. “He launched a smear campaign against me, saying I attacked him and tried to shoot him,” Daniels said Thursday.

“It made my life miserable for almost two years, having to deal with this guy,” he said.

On Thursday, North Mississippi Medical Center confirmed Curtis’ employment and said he was not terminated in response to accusations about the facility.

Under the name Kevin Curtis, multiple online posts describe the conspiracy Curtis claimed to have uncovered when working there. The posts say the conspiracy began when he “discovered a refrigerator full of dismembered body parts & organs wrapped in plastic in the morgue of the largest nonmetropolitan health care organization in the United States of America.”

The hospital’s statement says it works with an agency that specializes in harvesting organs and tissue from donors, and then immediately transports those organs for donation. The hospital says it is not paid for the donated organs.

Curtis wrote in his postings that he was trying to “expose various parties within the government, FBI, police departments” for what he believed was “a conspiracy to ruin my reputation in the community as well as an ongoing effort to break down the foundation I worked more than 20 years to build in the country music scene.”

In one post, Curtis said he sent letters to Wicker and other politicians.

“I never heard a word from anyone. I even ran into Roger Wicker several different times while performing at special banquets and fundraisers in northeast Mississippi but he seemed very nervous while speaking with me and would make a fast exit to the door when I engaged in conversation …”

Wicker said Thursday in Washington that he had met Curtis when Curtis was working as Elvis at a party Wicker and his wife helped throw about 10 years ago.

Wicker called him “quite entertaining” but said: “My impression is that since that time he’s had mental issues and perhaps is not as stable as he was back then.”

Thursday night, the FBI said lab tests confirmed the presence of ricin in the letters mailed to Obama and Wicker. Holland’s son, Mississippi state Rep. Steve Holland of Plantersville, said the letter sent to the judge was being tested.

Meanwhile, at least a dozen armed officers wearing gas masks and hazardous-material suits went into Curtis’ home later Thursday.

Raymond Zilinskas, a chemical- and biological-weapons expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California, called the process to make ricin elaborate. She said it would not be difficult to create a low-concentration version using instructions from the Internet, but a finer and more concentrated version would require laboratory equipment and expertise, she said.